Toward a More Civilized World
In our work, it is easy to become jaded. We have thousands of
heart attacks every day, and one in three of us develops cancer.
Americans now eat more than a million animals every hour, which,
in turn, contributes to the health problems we suffer from. Overall,
our society seems more aggressive and self-destructive than ever,
and we wonder if the picture will ever change.
The fact is, it will. If you will permit me to draw a lesson from
basic neurology:
In the human nervous system, the nerves that permit an infant
or toddler to carry out an action develop before the nerves that
inhibit or control that action. So a growing infant clumsily grabs
for a ball or a cup before becoming able to handle them carefully.
A baby screams and cries before learning how to control outbursts
or to turn cries into words. Children gain the ability to hurt
others before developing the empathy that puts the brakes on aggression.
A culture matures in the same way. We gain dangerous abilities
before we learn to control them. Fast food restaurants arrived
well before cardiologists warned that the Golden Arches lead to
the Pearly Gates. Scientists gained the ability to experiment on
animals in the cruelest ways imaginable long before anyone thought
to raise an ethical eyebrow.
Now, for an infant to mature, his or her parents have to confront
misbehavior gently, and help the child to learn to do better. For
a society to mature, it is our job to confront bad behavior gently,
too.
When it became clear that the U.S. government was letting the
meat and dairy industries have a major voice in dictating federal
diet policies, we gently confronted the government with a successful
lawsuit in federal court.
When experimenters planned to inject healthy children with a genetically
engineered growth hormone in order to test its ability to make
them taller, we went to court again, showing that the experimenters
had never explained to the parents or children the risks posed
by the injections.
When virtually every medical school forced students to experiment
on animals, we confronted them with armies of concerned students
who said they didn’t go to medical school to kill their first patient.
Wefve won already at more than 100 of the 126 U.S. medical schools,
and our work will continue until ethical education is the rule
at all medical schools.
When we needed to measure insulin levels in our diabetes study
and found that no laboratory had an insulin blood test that did
not include cruelly produced animal ingredients, we confronted
that lapse by working with laboratory scientists to produce a cruelty-free
test that is about to become commercially available to scientists
worldwide.
Where unethical research prevails, where doctors fail to help
patients prevent disease, where nutrition is simply ignored, when
our culture—and our scientific culture—is stuck in its toddler
years, our job is to confront that immaturity by doing ethical
research, publishing our findings in medical journals, speaking
at medical conferences, and doing as many press releases, advertisements,
and television programs as it takes to change that behavior.
It takes courage on the part of our physicians, our medical students,
and our staffers to confront cruelty and ignorance, and it is because
of you—our members—that we are able to succeed. And for that, I
thank you. We have a lot more work to do in the next 20 years,
and I look forward to continuing to work with you for a healthier
and more compassionate world.
Neal D. Barnard, M.D.
President of PCRM
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